Sophisticated corporate portals are taking over from the clunky intranets, and many analysts are of the opinion that these portals may soon become the new metaphor for desktop computing in businesses worldwide. Once viewed simply as a way to prove easy access to internal information using a web browser, this is changing with a new wave of software and in-house portals are evolving into much more. The new generation of portals is so easy to use and effective in enabling access to crucial applications, processes, data and reports that many organizations are now using portals as their new desktop, replacing a variety of commonly used applications. Data can originate from ERP or HIS systems, databases, spreadsheets, word-processing documents or presentations and can integrate with other data on a wide range of hardware, whether they be the latest UNIX or Windows Advanced Servers or the AS/400 or S/390 mainframes.

Symphony has the ability to provide solutions using enterprise application integration software, extensible markup language, proprietary middleware, flat file and ASCII text translation, and methods as basic as "green-screen stripping" or using a utility to copy data directly from a mainframe terminal.